Background
Paul Douglas was born on 11 April 1907 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Paul Douglas was born on 11 April 1907 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
If he ever had doubts, Douglas settled on being grouchy and bad-tempered when, having played Harry Brock in over one thousand performances of Bom Yesterday on Broadway, he turned down the movie and let Broderick Crawford make a meal of it. A few years later, Douglas and Judy Holliday were brought together in that obvious but appealing imitation, The Solid Gold Cadillac (56, Richard Quine). But the stage Harry Brock had carried Douglas to Fox where he made his debut in A Letter to Three Wives (49, Joseph L. Manlaewicz). That first part showed some vulnerability beneath the bluster, but Douglas quickly became typed as a bulldozer, either a comic butt or a cantankerous figure of authority: It Happens Every Spring (49, Lloyd Bacon); Everybody Does It (49, Edmund Goulding); Panic in the Streets (50, Elia Kazan); Love that Brute (50, Alexander Hall); Fourteen Hours (51, Henry Hathaway); The Guy Who Came Back (51, |oseph Newman); Angels in the Outfield (51, Clarence Brown); When in Rome (52, Brown).
He was much more touching as the naive fisherman husband of Barbara Stanwyck in Clash by Night (52, Fritz Lang), a sign that once his energies were modified he became more interesting. Too often he got away with a slightly nerve-racking performance of boorishness: We re Not Married (52, Goulding); Forever Female (53, Irving Rapper); and Executive Suite (54, Robert Wise). Because his huffing and puffing was so automatic, it was amusingly deflated in The Maggie (54, Alexander Mackendriek), in which he played an American tycoon remorselessly sapped by Scots prevarication. In the years before he finally wore himself out he was in Green Fire (54, Andrew Marton); Joe Macbeth (56, Ken Hughes); The Leather Saint (56, Alvin Ganzer); This Could Be the Night (57, Wise); Beau James (57, Melville Shavelson); Fortunella (58, Eduardo de Filippo); and The Mating Game (59, George Marshall), in which he played an Americanized version of II. E. Bates’s Pa Larkin.
The Solid Gold Cadillac
1956